If you build it, they will come. No truer words could be said about Banff National Park. As Canada’s first national park and a UNESCO World Heritage site, Banff holds icon status. Unsurprisingly, it also holds the title as the busiest park among Canada’s 48 national parks and national park reserves.
Visitors to Banff expect a pristine Rocky Mountains landscape framed with panoramic peaks, glacial lakes, waterfalls, vast wilderness and wildlife. But, in the busy summer months, they’re likely also encountering traffic congestion, a lack of parking, long lineups, overcrowding and overflowing garbage cans at day-use areas. All of this increases the potential for human-animal conflict and ecological impact, compromising the very thing that attracts visitors in the first place.
Banff National Park saw 4.28 million visits in 2023/24, the busiest year on record. The Lake Louise area has seen an even more pronounced increase in visitation within this time frame, especially in summer. A quarter of the park’s annual visits are to the Lake Minnewanka area, and traffic volumes there have increased by about 50 per cent over the past 10 years.
“The town of Banff was created to support tourism in the late 1800s. That has always been the purpose of this area,” says Natalie Fay, external relations manager for the Banff Field Unit with Parks Canada. “That in and of itself is quite unique. I don’t know of other places that were purpose built in that sense.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it gave many popular tourist destinations a reprieve from crowds, but it also hurt places like Banff, where strong visitor numbers fuel the local economy. Banff alone contributed about $1.2 billion to Alberta’s GDP in 2019.
Too Many Cars
When you ask Banff mayor Corrie DiManno if she feels her town is experiencing overtourism, she states: “Banff has one economy and that’s tourism. The reason that this town was incorporated was to serve as a visitor centre for the park. It’s more that we don’t have enough space for everybody’s vehicles, not necessarily that we don’t have space for the people in them.”
So, it seems that Banff has a car-overcrowding problem, rather than a people-overcrowding one. The Town of Banff’s threshold is 24,000 cars a day. Data shows that, during July and August, that number is often exceeded. On the Saturday of the 2024 August long weekend, for example, traffic volume at the main entrance reached more than 31,000 cars.
The park’s most popular areas, like Lake Louise, Moraine Lake, Johnston Canyon and the Minnewanka Loop, are also the sites of the worst parking and traffic problems. From June to September, parking lots at Lake Louise are often full by 7 a.m. At peak times, 85 per cent of private vehicles are turned away at parking lots because there are no spaces — an estimated 5,000 cars daily in 2022.
“Lake Louise Drive and Moraine Lake Road — they’re intersecting the Fairview wildlife corridor that’s an important highway for big animals transitioning between habitats in the Bow Valley,” says François Masse, superintendent of Lake Louise, Kootenay and Yoho with Parks Canada. “Road congestion ends up looking like a barrier for the wildlife that are trying to cross that road.”
Banff is also a very important headwater for the Bow River system, says Katie Morrison, executive director of the Southern Alberta chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. Since 1967, the chapter has led conservation efforts to protect areas in Banff National Park, Kananaskis, the Whaleback and Castle Provincial Park.
“Banff is special in that it has the full range of carnivores and large mammals that historically existed on that landscape, including the reintroduction of bison,” says Morrison. “What makes Banff different from a management context is the sheer volume of people who are visiting and using those areas. The pressure on the park is growing and growing, and the experience is really changing for people visiting.”
Enforcing Alternate Transportation
To address traffic and parking issues, in 2023, Moraine Lake Road was permanently closed to personal vehicles. Only Parks Canada shuttles, Roam public transit buses and commercial vehicle operators are now allowed.
Even before the change in policy, shuttle and bus services were seeing increased demand. Parks Canada reported a 29-per cent increase in ridership on its Lake Louise and Moraine Lake shuttles between 2022 and 2023. Other tactics for managing high visitation levels are already in place around the park, including seasonal and area restrictions, traffic controls, reservation systems and lotteries.
Similarly, in Yoho National Park, the only way to access the beautiful alpine backcountry at Lake O’Hara is by taking a Parks Canada shuttle bus from the parking lot, which requires a reservation. By limiting human impact, Parks Canada can keep sensitive areas from being loved to death.
“From a tourism sector’s perspective, we recognize the single biggest asset that we have is this beautiful place,” says Leslie Bruce, president and CEO of Banff & Lake Louise Tourism. “We’re very committed to ensuring it’s protected, and we definitely want to talk about ways to [better] access it in the future, not how we stop visitors from coming.”
Making a Plan to Reduce Car Use
To that end, a 10-year vision plan to guide visitor use in Banff and Lake Louise was created in 2023. Lead Tourism for Good was developed as a guidepost for tourism, and it’s a collaboration between Banff & Lake Louise Tourism, the Town of Banff, Parks Canada, and an Indigenous working group. The town’s residents, tourism employees and industry partners provided feedback, and the blueprint is meant to complement other long-range plans like the Parks Canada Management Plan and the town’s municipal plans.
“We started by just recognizing we needed to think differently. We have a car problem, not a people problem,” says Bruce. “We started thinking about how to move people out of their cars and onto bikes and into transit. And that has become, in a very short time, an accepted way to move in a national park.”
While the Town of Banff has seen little change in the number of personal vehicles entering the townsite in 2019 compared to 2023, that number (hovering around 6.5 million per year) is still too many. Encouragingly though, there’s been a 67-per cent increase in local transit ridership.
The On-It bus, which moves people between Calgary and Banff, has seen a huge increase riders — 116 per cent more in August 2023 than in the same month in 2019. Roam Transit, the Bow Valley’s public bus operator, with routes in Canmore, Banff and Lake Louise, saw a record-breaking 2.76 million riders last year.
In the face of increased demand from visitors, Parks Canada enlisted an expert panel to tackle the future of transportation in Banff National Park.
The report re-envisions how to move people sustainably through the Bow Valley and is full of bold recommendations like mobility hubs (sites that consolidate transportation services), intercept parking lots (located outside of central areas, so people switch to other forms of transport to enter town centre), gondolas and train service — all with the goal of lessening dependency on personal vehicles.
“Banff is such a special place; we are so glad that people want to spend time here in our community,” says DiManno. “We just ask that we all do things a little bit differently than we did pre-pandemic, and that includes the way you’re going to move around our townsite. Please get on transit. Please walk. Please ride your bike.
“I like to say that we need to change to stay the same. For me, that really means the way that we experience the townsite and the way we experience the national park. We need to ensure that this place is here for future generations to also enjoy it. And that means that we need to do our best to balance our reason for being.”
To Preserve and Present
When it comes to tourism and conservation, Masse and Fay say Parks Canada has a dual mandate, outlined in the National Parks Act, to preserve and present our national parks. “We’ve always seen it as more of a duality than a conflict. You can do both,” says Fay. “You can provide authentic visitor experiences while also ensuring that your conservation requirements are met.”
Taking an intentional, long-term view of improving the impact of visitation takes creativity. It means walking the tightrope between hosting visitors and minimizing the strain on the ecology of the park. All parties seem committed to ensuring a resilient future for Banff and supporting a sustainable balance between a healthy natural environment and prosperity for the local community.
“This is one of the most incredible places on the earth,” says Bruce. “We’d like to take as many opportunities as possible to focus on the right future for us and think about encouraging, motivating and inspiring people to get on board with the changes we want and need to make so that we can have this place for future generations.”
It’s easy to be moved by the mountain wilderness in Banff and feel compelled to protect it. In that sense, tourism can bring people together and be a force for change. But can tourism actually leave a place better than it found it? If it addresses environmental sustainability, community well-being, cultural integrity and economic prosperity, the area’s stakeholders say yes.